Reflecting on My First Design Job
During my Senior year of college, I was required to find an internship in order to graduate. Since my focus was on web development, I ended up working as Web Editor on campus as a part of the Student Media team. My first semester consisted of attending meetings and holding office hours, while we worked toward the goal of rebranding the campus’ newspaper: The George-Anne. I didn’t know I was doing UX at the time, but I was drafting sets of some of my very first wireframes and performing user tests. Over Christmas break, I taught myself how to painstakingly code a Joomla! template from scratch, following a few tips I picked up in a previous class on how to set up a local server on my laptop, using MAMP. That spring, after lots of testing, we launched the re-brand and the new website at the same time, and it was the first time my work saw such a huge audience.
Since the position was for students only, once I graduated, someone else filled my shoes, but my design stayed online until the team no longer used Joomla!. My time as a member of Student Media was the quintessential college experience—I’ve made lifelong friends, including my fiancé!
Not only did I fill my web editor role, but I also helped out the team as a friend, like make videos that are 100% hilarious to look back on today!!